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Land Reform in Revolutionary Ethiopia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Extract
The attention of the world was briefly focused on Ethiopia when Emperor Haile Selassie I, once considered the inviolable descendant of Solomon and Sheba, and the Elect of God, was deposed on 12 September 1974, and when two months later 60 public and military officials were executed without trial. The ‘creeping coup’ began in March 1974, and was undertaken by the military Co-ordinating Committee (commonly called the Dirgue, the Amharic word for ‘committee’) in the name of the peasants. Until the Nationalisation of Rural Lands Proclamation of 4 March 1975, however, the activities of the Dirgue were designed to secure an urban power base, and the peasants and the politics of numbers were tacitly irrelevant to a continuing paternal, factional, and urbanised political style. As the prologue to the Proclamation indicates, the Dirgue recognises the centrality of land reform to a broadly-based rural development:
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References
page 637 note 1 Proclamation No. 31 of 1975, Negarit Gazeta Addis Ababa), Year 1934, No. 26.
page 638 note 1 Gill, Gerard, ‘The Agricultural Sector: introduction’, in Gill, (ed.), Readings on the Ethiopian Economy (Addis Ababa, 1974), p. 29Google Scholar. See also Bequele, Assefa and Chole, Eshetu, A Profile of the Ethiopian Economy (Addis Ababa, 1969), p. 28Google Scholar; and Cohen, John and Weintraub, Dov, Land and Peasants in Imperial Ethiopia (Assen, 1975), pp. 2–5Google Scholar.
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page 638 note 3 Cohen and Weintraub, op. cit. pp. 2–4.
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page 648 note 1 No. 241 of 1966, Consolidated Laws of Ethiopia, Section 27, Subject 2.
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page 649 note 3 Articles 10 (1) and (6), 17–18, and 27.
page 650 note 1 These complex issues are discussed by Ottaway, ‘Land Reform’, loc. cit. and Hoben, ‘Perspectives’, loc. cit.
page 650 note 2 Hoben, Ibid.
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page 656 note 1 Ottaway, ‘Land Reform’, loc. cit.; and Legum, op. cit. p. 71.
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page 658 note 2 Schwab, op. cit. p. 86.
page 659 note 1 See Cohen, John M., ‘Ethiopian Provincial Elites and the Process of Change’, in Journal of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa), xi, 1973, p. 107Google Scholar; and Shack, William A., The Gurage: a people of the Ensete culture (London, 1966), pp. 163 and 165.Google Scholar
page 659 note 2 Quoted by Reo M. Christensen et al., Ideologies and Modem Politics (London, 1971), p. 152. Similarities between the land reform experience of Ethiopia and China are only superficial, and comparisons with the Tanzanian model – much admired by the Ethiopian modernising élite – are more fruitful. See Ibid.. pp. 153–4; Gray, Jack, ‘The Chinese Model’, in Nove, Alex and Nuti, D. M. (eds.), Socialist Economics (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 492–5Google Scholar; and James, op. cit. pp. 21 and 26.
page 659 note 3 Thomson, op. cit. pp. 153–4
page 660 note 1 James, op. cit. p. 169.
page 660 note 2 Jacoby, op. cit. p. 341.
page 660 note 3 Quoted by Uphoff and Ilchman (eds.), op. cit. p. 75.
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